A National RDD Smartphone Web Survey: Comparison With a Large-Scale CAPI Survey

Abstract

The most important national surveys of the general population for creating official statistics or public policymaking in many countries, including South Korea, are still conducted using face-to-face interviews with household members. Recently face-to-face surveys have faced threats to data quality from decreasing response rates and rising costs of in-person visits. The COVID-19 pandemic and associated lockdown exacerbated the situation for face-to-face surveys. Survey organizations suspended fieldwork or began to explore alternate means of collecting data. One alternative was a shift to telephone surveys; however, telephone interviews have encountered similar difficulties with declining response rates and increasing costs. Could a self-administered web survey be a viable alternative to interviewer-administered modes such as telephone interviews (CATI) or face-to-face interviews (CAPI)? Smartphones may offer opportunities not offered by other modes. We conducted a smartphone web survey using SMS invitations where a sample of cell phone numbers was selected by random digit dialing (RDD) and compared it with a large-scale national face-to-face survey (CAPI) where a sample of households was selected by stratified cluster sampling. The two surveys were conducted during the COVID pandemic in the second half of 2020. The coverage and sample representation of the smartphone web survey were comparable to that of the face-to-face survey. Despite the relatively small number of respondents, the quality of the smartphone web survey was sufficient to provide accurate data and compared favorably with the CAPI survey. The smartphone web survey yielded more reports of socially undesirable attitudes and behavior than the CAPI survey. The findings will guide researchers to explore new opportunities in establishing a web survey methodology that obtains data more conveniently, efficiently, accurately, and with less cost.

The workplace of the future: the COVID-19 pandemic and working from home in Swiss small businesses

“…Data for the research project were collected using the well-established approach of a computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) survey (Kim and Couper, 2020;Peter et al, 2023). A survey of thirteen questions was designed that allowed the collection of information about MDs from Swiss MSEs to analyse patterns regarding the changeover to WFH during and after the first COVID-19 lockdown from March to June 2020.…”